Thursday, July 4, 2013

It’s The
Fourth of July in the U.S.A., and at mid-day my wife and I just had a classic American hot dog with chili, mustard, and pickle relish. I will fire up the bar-b-que this afternoon
to grill a couple of New York steaks and accompany it with twice-baked
potatoes. And then the fireworks, which explode at an air force base not far from our house. And yes, I do have an American flag flying outside the front of my house.

I have
no discussion of an American patriotic story to regale you with. Patriotic
polemics, while appropriate for July Fourth parades and picnics, do not always
make good stories. So I thought I would
commemorate the Fourth with a brief discussions of two of America’s earliest
short stories--both of which center on the shift from the colonies to the
republic.

The
first sentence of Fred Lewis Pattee's classic history of the American short
story states authoritatively, "The American short story began in 1819 with
Washington Irving." Claiming that with his craftsmanship, originality, and
style, Irving made short fiction popular by stripping away the form's moral and
didactic element and by adding richness of atmosphere, unity of tone, humor,
definite locality, and individual characters, Pattee concludes that in Irving
the "Addisonian Arctic current was cut across by the Gulf Stream of
romanticism," to give birth to the American short story, "a new
genre, something distinctively and unquestionably our own in the world of
letters."

Actually, a number of genres and narrative conventions come together in the
work of Irving: travel sketch, folktale, gothic romance, historical romance,
and neoclassical essay. The first problem for students of the short story to
consider is the effect of linking a descriptive genre--the sketch--with a
narrative genre--the folktale--in Irving's two most famous short fictions.

It is
well known that the plots for "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow" came from German legend. However, in a letter dated
September 4, 1824, Irving made it clear that these plots were merely vulgar
vehicles for what he considered a respectable rhetorical purpose: "I wish,
in everything I do, to write in such a manner that my productions may have
something more than the mere interest of narrative to recommend them, which is
very evanescent; something, if I dare use the phrase, of classical merit,
&c., which gives a production some chance of duration beyond the mere whim
and fashion of the day.”

One of the most important results of Irving's devaluation of the tale and
elevation of style and tone is that tale conventions are foregrounded and
parodied by the sophisticated teller who mocks the supernatural basis of the
tale. Furthermore, because sketch conventions focus more attention on specific
detail than the primarily narrative tale form, the formerly projective and
plot-based gothic tale is altered by the presence of a skeptical narrator who
is more concerned with expressing his own impressionistic perspective than with
telling a story. Moreover, because the teller is highly self-conscious of his
use of realistic techniques of the sketch to present psychological projections
of the tale, the resulting story tends to foreground, and thus thematize,
storytelling elements; this is a very common effect when a short story
self-consciously adopts the conventions of previous genres as a means of
parodying them. Finally, the self-conscious skeptical narrator tends to probe
beneath the supernatural base of the story to expose its origins in dream and
wish fulfillment.

"Rip Van Winkle" is the most obvious example of this exposure of the
wish-fulfillment base of the traditional story. If the folklore source of
"Rip Van Winkle" is undisclosed, its self-conscious literary source
is foregrounded in the prologue, which attributes the tale to Diedrich
Knickerbocker, an historian who, although he does his research among the folk,
treats the folk as though they were the "clasped volume of a black-letter"
book which he studies with the "zeal of a book-worm." The tone here
is not that of the folklore teller, but of the ruminative sophisticate who
considers the meaning of what he tells, in this case meditating on how shrewish
wives may make the tempers of their husbands pliant, concluding, with an ironic
Addison/Steele style aside: "A termagant wife may, therefore, in some
respects be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was
thrice blessed."

That Rip's disappearance into the mountains is the result of his desire to
escape his wife, not just for a day, but forever, is suggested by the fact that
his departure is simultaneous with the depth of his despair when he is
psychically ready for deliverance; and indeed, just as he looks down into a
deep mountain glen, "wild, lonely, and shagged," an embodiment of his
despondency, he sighs and hears his name, the identify he finds intolerable,
called out.

The most
significant leap of time in American fiction--the twenty years that Rip sleeps--is
made in the space between the end of one paragraph and the next, which begins,
"On waking." And on waking, Rip is, of course, not where he was when
watching the men playing, but rather back at the edge of the wild glen where he
felt such despair and heard the name called of an identity he will now have
reason to doubt. As is typical of other 19th-century short-story characters who
undergo experiences they cannot naturalize precisely because their experiences
exist within the realm of a different genre from the one they seem to inhabit,
Rip feels "perplexity" and wonders whether he is bewitched or if the
world is. Time has passed as time must, but Rip sleeps in the realm of one
story while events go on around him in the realm of another. And since one's
identity is determined by the story he inhabits, Rip believes he is not himself
but someone else. When he sees his son, who has lived in the time-bound world
of reality while he has lived in the timeless world of dream and folktale, Rip
says, "That's me yonder." Like Hawthorne's Wakefield, he has stepped
aside into a story of his own desire for escape and thus has been displaced in
the world of phenomenological reality.

It is poetic justice and narrative inevitability that just as Rip has
objectified his deepest desire in oneiric story, on awaking in the world
transformed from the old Dutch sleepiness into the new American wakefulness,
his new identity would become that of storyteller. And like Coleridge's Ancient
Mariner, Rip does tell his story, over and over again, to anyone who will
listen, sometimes varying its details, which the skeptical narrator, in typical
Hawthorne fashion, says is "doubtless owing to his having so recently
wakened." The narrator concludes with a foregrounded essayistic meditation
on the wish-fulfillment source of the story: "It is a common wish of all
henpecked husbands..... that they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van
Winkle's flagon."

Even more than in "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow" sustains a world of dream where story contagion is in the air.
Just as the deep glen is an objectification of Rip's deepest desire to escape
despair, Sleepy Hollow is a place that does not exist except in the
imagination, a timeless region located in space, a placeless place where one
could steal away and dream his life away. It is dreamy, bewitched, spellbound;
people are given to marvelous beliefs, are subject to visions, see strange
sights; it is tale-haunted world, an enchanted region, a region of shadows. By
placing such a timeless story in the realm of the time bound, Irving creates a
hybrid tale quite different than what has gone before. "The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow," a story about fiction's ability to alter the nature of
reality, self-consciously particularizes a timeless legend by localizing it in
space and grounding it in social reality.

The most obvious sign of the story's hybrid nature is the pervasive
overdetermination in the story; everything is extreme, overdone, multiplied.
Katrina is plump as a partridge; Brom is Herculean; Ichabod is American
literature's quintessential grotesque. One of the most puzzling of these
overdeterminations is the fact that Katrina's sending Ichabod away after the
party makes Brom Bones' headless horseman trick unnecessary. However, whereas
practical explanations may suffice in a realistic tale, they will not do in a
folk legend, for the short story convention insists that Ichabod's story world
must be actualized. "No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious
swallow." Thus, the skeptical narrator leaves the conclusion of the
story--whether the headless horseman or Brom Bones chased Ichabod out of the
valley--open, leaving the mix of two types of stories--folktale of headless
goblins or realistic story of one man getting rid of a rival--in suspension.

Both
stories are grounded in the radical tension between the old European cultures that established the American Northeast and the developing new Yankee American culture. In
“Rip Van Winkle,” Rip sleeps through the whole American Revolution, waking to a
brave new world.
In “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” although Brom Bones saves the sleepy old
Dutch world from the omnivorous Yankee appetite, the respite is only temporary.

2 comments:

I stumbled across your blog while searching for more info on Ron Rash whose "Nothing gold can stay" I have recently enjoyed. Short stories are my favourite medium of recreational reading and I've been a big fan of Alice Munro for decades, eagerly awaiting each new collection - so I add my birthday wishes to yours and hope she will find yet more to delight us.Many of the writers you mention are accessible here in Tasmania, (mainly through our excellent state library service) but there are also some whose stories impressed me, that you may not have heard of and I'd like to recommend: "The Gurkha's daughter" 2013 Prajwal Parajuly, "Like a house on fire" 2012 Cate Kennedy (an Australian author).Thanks for your blog which has given me some new avenues to explore in reading my way through our southern winter!

Reality of Artifice

New Short Story Theories

Followers

About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."